Monday, August 01, 2016

ambition and the novel

The first novels examined in Peter Brooks’ Reading For the Plot come from the nineteenth
century, and in particular, the French nineteenth century. Putting such
enormous critical stress on Balzac, Stendhal and Zola helps Brooks maintain his
historical thesis - that the novel is in
rapport with the bourgeois revolution in values, which changed the meaning of
ambition in the stereotypical life cycle. It isn’t that the bourgeois ethos
encourages unilaterally the valorization of ambition, in contradiction to the norms of
the ancien regime; but ambition becomes an intrinsic part of plotting.

“The ambitious heros of the 19th century novel –
those of Balzac, for instance – may regularly be conceived as ‘desiring
machines’ whose presence in the text sustains narrative movement through the
forward march of desire… Etymology may suggest that the self creates a ‘circle’
– an ambitus – or aureola around itself, mainly in front of itself.”

This interesting but awkwardly phrased notion of the ambitus
(is the circle in front of the self a projection?) is, to my mind, a potent
hint at the role ambition plays both within and without the novel. Ambition is
a capturing passion – it doesn’t desire to incorporate the circled objects so
much as to hold them, to an extent, hostage. Outside the novel, ambitiom is
given now a positive, now a negative meaning, an ambiguity generated in a
commercial society that has secularized charisma as salesmanship without quite
being comfortable at the fundamental substitutability of all things – including
the self – implied by the universal dissolvant of capitalism.

Joanne Bamberger has written that Hillary Clinton’s ambition
is negatively coded, in contrast to the praise male politicians receive for
being ambitious. I’m not sure that she is right about all male politicians –
especially her example, which is Obama. Obama’s ambition to be president in
2008 was regularly mocked as overreach for a man whose whole experience in
politics was rather shortlived. However, Bamberger has a point that ambition
for a woman is often viewed as a negative – the archetype of Lady Macbeth is
just below the surface in certain attacks on Clinton.

The shift in the value attached to ambition derives I think
from the way the social unconscious invests in the the image of the ambitus. On
the one hand, we within the circle participate, by proximity, to the charismatic
and, ultimately, divine. On the other hand, reverse the values and we within
the circle participate, unwillingly, in the abject and the soiled. Aversion transforms proximity into infection.

In the American novel, under the sign of ambition, there is
a pattern of such transformations from infatuation to aversion. You can see
this kind of mechanism at work in Dreiser’s novels. And yet that novel type is,
to contemporary readers, I think, a little too transparent. Or at least it is
in the novel – it lives happily in film.

Outside of the sign of ambition, though, a strange thing
happens in the novel. The protagonist falls into despair – or at least the threat
of despair becomes one of the great patterns in the non-realistic novel. That
despair arises from the fact that, without ambition, the novel itself, and the
narrative logic of the world by which the protagonist parses the world, is fundamentally
threatened. The spirit around the social that makes acts and events meaningful,
in commercial society, is exorcized, but no ready replacement comes into view.
The non-ambitious self confronts a world of pure, baseless induction, of
sequences that are purely conjunctive, but void of life. In fact, without
ambition, the self confronts its own routines as malevolent and other. This is
the dark side of the futurist exhiliration in de-routinizing the given –
without some utopian ambition that lends to the de-routinized moment some satisfying
sense of authenticity, the de-routinized
just becomes a reminder of hopelessly one is bound to routine, as an intimate
enemy, an irrational tic for which there is no cure.

2 comments:

So (given yesterday's date), where in all this would we set Melville, or James? I'd bet Ahab saw himself as valorous (in some Old Testament sort of way), but he sure wasn't motivated by bourgeois ambition; and as much as James' characters seem proscribed by the dictates of their class and culture, their ambitions seem to be about itches they can never really scratch.

Great question! In fact, it is a question that becomes Jamesian plot in the Ambassadors, with a child of factory built fortune (a fortune built on some material so humble James can't even summon the will to tell us what it is) loses his native aspirations in Paris, and must be summoned back. Can ambition be sublimated into some higher striving - I think that was one of James's great questions, no? It is interesting, given the different value of ambition for males and females in the sexist culture, that James always awards the sentiment to the non-ambitious woman - Kate Croy seems all too vulgar compared to Milly Theale, although I think most readers, like me, like Kate much better. Anyway, a very good question.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.